Live Music
Archive
Librivox
Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Internet
Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American
Libraries
TV News
Understanding
9/11Piano Illiterature - Volume 7: Titin
Audio With External Links Item Preview
Share or Embed This Item
- Publication date
- 2013
- Usage
- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
- Topics
- piano, electronic music, experimental music, sky-diving, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, Titin, Elisa Schwenninger, whistling
- Item Size
- 5.6G
Piano Illiterature - Volume 7:
In 1998, my friend etta cetera compiled a publication called "Edge Wise" that was about last words. For it, I contributed the longest word that I knew of at the time: the chemical name for tryptophan synthetase A protein, a 1,913-letter enzyme with 267 amino acids. Thanks to "Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words" for that one. The idea was that instead of saying something pithy, I imagined myself saying something long-winded, something highly unlikely to be said in an advanced debilitated state.
In November, 2010, my old friend the poet/essayist Alan Davies started interviewing me w/ an eye toward publishing. By September, 2011, he asked me: "If things were to have an-ending / what would it look like? / what would you be doing?" to wch I replied:
"Of course, yr question prompts my asking in turn: "What "things"?" Often, when works address this topic, 'the end' is imagined as the death of most or all people - more rarely it's the death of all living things on this planet, more rare still it's the annihilation of the planet - but how often does it go beyond that? Of my most immediate concern is the death of my closest friends & of myself.
"But let's imagine further: you ask about "an-ending" - not THE ending, not one-of-many-possible-endings, just an-ending. If we were to discuss "an-ending" that's THE ending, "would it look like" anything? Would I be "doing" anything? It wd be "an-end[ing]" to looking & doing, to me, to you, to this sentence, to this language, to this planet, to this solar system, to the possibility of this solar system, to the galaxy, to the universe, to the multiverse, to ways of measuring itself, to itself - to spin off of what my girlfriend Amy Catanzano often discusses: it'd be not just an end to human scale but to ALL SCALE. PERIOD.
"But let's scale it back down again: being a morbid person from time-to-time & being proactive (to use a word perhaps overused in contexts I don't necessarily always want to associate myself w/), I have an ongoing fantasy in wch I learn that I'm to die soon. SO, I get a dr.'s certificate explaining this (duly notarized, etc) & I take this to places where I might not ordinarily be able to partake of what's available there - say an expensive restaurant.
"In this example, I go to the restaurant w/ a hidden camera & mic & I show them the certificate & explain that one of my dying wishes is to have a free lavish meal there. I explain this politely but I look as I ordinarily do: eccentrically dressed, perhaps a little dirty - definitely not like the rest of the clientele.
"If I'm denied a free meal there (perhaps for myself & a friend), then I make the clandestine documentary footage available to the world as widely as possible - identifying the restaurant. If they graciously give me a free meal I do the same thing. Thus, I have one of my final roles be that of a SECRET SHOPPER FOR TRICKSTER CULTURE.
"Another human-scale/my-death fantasy is this: I'm on my death-bed (or death-car-seat or death-sidewalk, etc) & my last word is:"
This last was then followed by what I found to be the current longest word in English, the full chemical name of Titin. This was found on Sarah McCullough's blog & was identified as 189,819 letters long! After providing the full word in my answer to Alan, I followed it w/:
"Obviously, I've picked this as my last word b/c it's the longest word I 'know' of. But, how do I 'know' of it? [..] Who's going to proofread this word? Not me. (Not today at least) It wd be a shame to mispronounce my last word or to pronounce the wrong chemical name. How wd I ever live it down? [naturally, I also think that that ONE WORD's being longer than the rest of this interview is fucking hilarious]
"Imagine that I cd pronounce this word in its entirety as my last word! That wd be quite an accomplishment - esp for someone in the highly reduced state of functioning that precedes death. Think of how long it wd take just to pronounce the thing! People have been reported to've continued talking briefly after being decapitated by a guillotine. Wd I be able to say this word as my head fell into the basket below the blade?
"If I were writing a story about a person trying to trick the grim reaper into a reprieve, it might incorporate this. The person might ask for death to be postponed long enuf for them to correctly say a last word of their own choosing. Then they cd try to read the above. Given that they'd be unlikely to succeed at this, their death cd be indefinitely postponed. Then again, trying to pronounce this word over & over might be such a bore that they'd welcome death in the long run."
As it turned out, I DID proofread the word & discovered 5 typos wch I corrected - the result being that I realized that the word is 189,824 letters long - 5 letters longer than the online claim.
There's one "asparty' that shd have an "l' at the end.
There's one "alyl" that shd have a 'v" at the beginning.
There's one "hreonyl" that shd have a "t" at the beginning.
There's one "ethionyl" that shd have an "m" at the beginning.
At the very end "serx" shd be "seryl".
In honor of the planned book release featuring this word, I decided to make a movie that I'd screen as part of the event.
On July 3, 2013, I started a brief friendship w/ Elisa. I learned that she plays piano & we bonded over that. I asked her if she wanted to go sky-diving, something that I'd wanted to do for a long time, & she said yes. In the interest of complicating my "Titin" movie, I then proposed that we each say the 23 component names while sky-diving. This plan yielded this set of instructions:
Say 1st & only once: methionyl(meh-THY-oh-nil)
Say at least once: titin(TI-tin)
Say many times: alanyl(AH-la-NIL)
Say last & only once: isoleucine(EYE-so-LEW-seen)
Except where otherwise noted, say any of the below
any amount of times:
acetyl(AH-see-tul)
Say many times: alanyl(AH-la-NIL)
arginyl(AR-jin-ul)
asparaginyl(uh-SPAAR-uh-jean-ul)
aspartyl(uh-SPART-ul)
cysteinyl(SIS-t-nel)
glutaminyl(gloo-TAM-uh-nil)
glutamyl(GLU-tuh-mil)
glycyl(GLII-sul)
histidyl(HIST-ih-del)
Say last & only once: isoleucine(EYE-so-LEW-seen)
isoleucyl(I-so-LU-sil)
leucyl(LU-sil)
lysyl(LI-sul)
Say 1st & only once: methionyl(meh-THY-oh-nil)
phenyl(FEN-ul)
prolyl(PRO-lil)
seryl(SEAR-ul)
threonyl(THREE-uh-nel)
Say at least once: titin(TI-tin)
tryptophyl(TRIP-toe-phil)
tyrosyl(TY-ra-sil)
valyl(VAL-el)
The sky-diving enunciations then became a primary part of the "Titin" movie. For the movie, I had the full word crawl from right-to-left on the bottom, the word broken into its 23 component names in the order they appear as a bottom-to-top scroll on the left side & my pronunciation guide to these component names scrolling from bottom-to-top on the right side. Presenting the word at a speed that I deemed 'readable' then took 7 & 1/2 hrs. The movie was then divided into 4 parts that corresponded to the 4 parts of the sky-diving experience: Preparation, Free-Fall, Parachuting, Landing.
01 Titin - pt 1 - 1:59:36 - sky-diving July 18, 2013; piano improvisation August 3, 2013, by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
Since, in the ultra-slow pace of the movie, this is just the beginning (despite its length), the only component name I used was "methionyl" (because it's the beginning of the full "Titin") wch occurs everytime that part appears in the crawling & scrolling word. By August 3rd, my friendship w/ Elisa had come to an end & I decided to play a somewhat relentless 2 hr piano improvisation to express the emotions I was feeling. The challenge was simply to keep it going - I'd never played piano continuously for that long before.
02 Titin - pt 2 - 1:52:12 - sky-diving July 18, 2013; "Titin" composed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE July, 2013 & performed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (61 key version: electronics) & Elisa (88 key version: acoustic piano) July, 2013
I composed a keyboard-mapping score (where the score shows a keyboard w/ instructions on it that's placed above the keyboard being played) assigning the 23 component names of Titin to 23 of the keys & specifying rough instructions based on how often & where those components appear w/in the overall word. I made an 88 key score & a 61 key score for playing 2 duets that were used in parts 2 & 4 of the movie respectively. The other sound present in "pt 2" is the extremely slowed-down wind noise from the sky-diving free-falling.
03 Titin - pt 3 - 1:59:52 - sky-diving July 18, 2013; piano rehearsal: Elisa September, 2013
By the 3rd part the editing involved the shouting-out of all the component names that Elisa & I remembered during our parachuting + the remainder of these words said by Elisa when we visited the Bayernhof Museum (wch has a wonderful collection of automatic instruments audible in snippets here) wch appear in the soundtrack in systematic increasing density. This is augmented by Elisa practicing:
"Scherzo in Bb Major" by Franz Schubert
"Nocturne" by Frederic Chopin
"La fille aux chevaux de lin" by Claude Debussy
"Sonate Pathetique" by Ludwig van Beethoven
"Trois Gymnopedies" by Eric Satie
"Knight Rupert" by Robert Schumann
in that order. I can hardly emphasize enough the complexity of this edit.
04 Titin - pt 4 - 1:43:29 - sky-diving July 18, 2013; "Titin" composed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE July, 2013 & performed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (88 key version: acoustic piano) & Elisa (61 key version: electronics - as set up by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE) July, 2013
In the middle of the very early morning of the day when we were scheduled to go sky-diving Elisa went for a long walk that took her to a place w/ nice reverb acoustics. I met her there & shot some footage of her & my whistling. I then manipulated this to produce a loop of primitive quasi-Shepard-tones to create an illusion of continual falling in honor of this being the landing section.
Need I say? I haven't explained 'everything' about this, verbose as this description may seem. Anyway, I'd like to screen the movie somewhere, preferably as an installation. With this in mind, I've made an abridged version of it for Vimeo that's only 2:06 long for promotional purposes. It can be witnessed here:
https://vimeo.com/86542569
In 1998, my friend etta cetera compiled a publication called "Edge Wise" that was about last words. For it, I contributed the longest word that I knew of at the time: the chemical name for tryptophan synthetase A protein, a 1,913-letter enzyme with 267 amino acids. Thanks to "Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words" for that one. The idea was that instead of saying something pithy, I imagined myself saying something long-winded, something highly unlikely to be said in an advanced debilitated state.
In November, 2010, my old friend the poet/essayist Alan Davies started interviewing me w/ an eye toward publishing. By September, 2011, he asked me: "If things were to have an-ending / what would it look like? / what would you be doing?" to wch I replied:
"Of course, yr question prompts my asking in turn: "What "things"?" Often, when works address this topic, 'the end' is imagined as the death of most or all people - more rarely it's the death of all living things on this planet, more rare still it's the annihilation of the planet - but how often does it go beyond that? Of my most immediate concern is the death of my closest friends & of myself.
"But let's imagine further: you ask about "an-ending" - not THE ending, not one-of-many-possible-endings, just an-ending. If we were to discuss "an-ending" that's THE ending, "would it look like" anything? Would I be "doing" anything? It wd be "an-end[ing]" to looking & doing, to me, to you, to this sentence, to this language, to this planet, to this solar system, to the possibility of this solar system, to the galaxy, to the universe, to the multiverse, to ways of measuring itself, to itself - to spin off of what my girlfriend Amy Catanzano often discusses: it'd be not just an end to human scale but to ALL SCALE. PERIOD.
"But let's scale it back down again: being a morbid person from time-to-time & being proactive (to use a word perhaps overused in contexts I don't necessarily always want to associate myself w/), I have an ongoing fantasy in wch I learn that I'm to die soon. SO, I get a dr.'s certificate explaining this (duly notarized, etc) & I take this to places where I might not ordinarily be able to partake of what's available there - say an expensive restaurant.
"In this example, I go to the restaurant w/ a hidden camera & mic & I show them the certificate & explain that one of my dying wishes is to have a free lavish meal there. I explain this politely but I look as I ordinarily do: eccentrically dressed, perhaps a little dirty - definitely not like the rest of the clientele.
"If I'm denied a free meal there (perhaps for myself & a friend), then I make the clandestine documentary footage available to the world as widely as possible - identifying the restaurant. If they graciously give me a free meal I do the same thing. Thus, I have one of my final roles be that of a SECRET SHOPPER FOR TRICKSTER CULTURE.
"Another human-scale/my-death fantasy is this: I'm on my death-bed (or death-car-seat or death-sidewalk, etc) & my last word is:"
This last was then followed by what I found to be the current longest word in English, the full chemical name of Titin. This was found on Sarah McCullough's blog & was identified as 189,819 letters long! After providing the full word in my answer to Alan, I followed it w/:
"Obviously, I've picked this as my last word b/c it's the longest word I 'know' of. But, how do I 'know' of it? [..] Who's going to proofread this word? Not me. (Not today at least) It wd be a shame to mispronounce my last word or to pronounce the wrong chemical name. How wd I ever live it down? [naturally, I also think that that ONE WORD's being longer than the rest of this interview is fucking hilarious]
"Imagine that I cd pronounce this word in its entirety as my last word! That wd be quite an accomplishment - esp for someone in the highly reduced state of functioning that precedes death. Think of how long it wd take just to pronounce the thing! People have been reported to've continued talking briefly after being decapitated by a guillotine. Wd I be able to say this word as my head fell into the basket below the blade?
"If I were writing a story about a person trying to trick the grim reaper into a reprieve, it might incorporate this. The person might ask for death to be postponed long enuf for them to correctly say a last word of their own choosing. Then they cd try to read the above. Given that they'd be unlikely to succeed at this, their death cd be indefinitely postponed. Then again, trying to pronounce this word over & over might be such a bore that they'd welcome death in the long run."
As it turned out, I DID proofread the word & discovered 5 typos wch I corrected - the result being that I realized that the word is 189,824 letters long - 5 letters longer than the online claim.
There's one "asparty' that shd have an "l' at the end.
There's one "alyl" that shd have a 'v" at the beginning.
There's one "hreonyl" that shd have a "t" at the beginning.
There's one "ethionyl" that shd have an "m" at the beginning.
At the very end "serx" shd be "seryl".
In honor of the planned book release featuring this word, I decided to make a movie that I'd screen as part of the event.
On July 3, 2013, I started a brief friendship w/ Elisa. I learned that she plays piano & we bonded over that. I asked her if she wanted to go sky-diving, something that I'd wanted to do for a long time, & she said yes. In the interest of complicating my "Titin" movie, I then proposed that we each say the 23 component names while sky-diving. This plan yielded this set of instructions:
Say 1st & only once: methionyl(meh-THY-oh-nil)
Say at least once: titin(TI-tin)
Say many times: alanyl(AH-la-NIL)
Say last & only once: isoleucine(EYE-so-LEW-seen)
Except where otherwise noted, say any of the below
any amount of times:
acetyl(AH-see-tul)
Say many times: alanyl(AH-la-NIL)
arginyl(AR-jin-ul)
asparaginyl(uh-SPAAR-uh-jean-ul)
aspartyl(uh-SPART-ul)
cysteinyl(SIS-t-nel)
glutaminyl(gloo-TAM-uh-nil)
glutamyl(GLU-tuh-mil)
glycyl(GLII-sul)
histidyl(HIST-ih-del)
Say last & only once: isoleucine(EYE-so-LEW-seen)
isoleucyl(I-so-LU-sil)
leucyl(LU-sil)
lysyl(LI-sul)
Say 1st & only once: methionyl(meh-THY-oh-nil)
phenyl(FEN-ul)
prolyl(PRO-lil)
seryl(SEAR-ul)
threonyl(THREE-uh-nel)
Say at least once: titin(TI-tin)
tryptophyl(TRIP-toe-phil)
tyrosyl(TY-ra-sil)
valyl(VAL-el)
The sky-diving enunciations then became a primary part of the "Titin" movie. For the movie, I had the full word crawl from right-to-left on the bottom, the word broken into its 23 component names in the order they appear as a bottom-to-top scroll on the left side & my pronunciation guide to these component names scrolling from bottom-to-top on the right side. Presenting the word at a speed that I deemed 'readable' then took 7 & 1/2 hrs. The movie was then divided into 4 parts that corresponded to the 4 parts of the sky-diving experience: Preparation, Free-Fall, Parachuting, Landing.
01 Titin - pt 1 - 1:59:36 - sky-diving July 18, 2013; piano improvisation August 3, 2013, by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
Since, in the ultra-slow pace of the movie, this is just the beginning (despite its length), the only component name I used was "methionyl" (because it's the beginning of the full "Titin") wch occurs everytime that part appears in the crawling & scrolling word. By August 3rd, my friendship w/ Elisa had come to an end & I decided to play a somewhat relentless 2 hr piano improvisation to express the emotions I was feeling. The challenge was simply to keep it going - I'd never played piano continuously for that long before.
02 Titin - pt 2 - 1:52:12 - sky-diving July 18, 2013; "Titin" composed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE July, 2013 & performed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (61 key version: electronics) & Elisa (88 key version: acoustic piano) July, 2013
I composed a keyboard-mapping score (where the score shows a keyboard w/ instructions on it that's placed above the keyboard being played) assigning the 23 component names of Titin to 23 of the keys & specifying rough instructions based on how often & where those components appear w/in the overall word. I made an 88 key score & a 61 key score for playing 2 duets that were used in parts 2 & 4 of the movie respectively. The other sound present in "pt 2" is the extremely slowed-down wind noise from the sky-diving free-falling.
03 Titin - pt 3 - 1:59:52 - sky-diving July 18, 2013; piano rehearsal: Elisa September, 2013
By the 3rd part the editing involved the shouting-out of all the component names that Elisa & I remembered during our parachuting + the remainder of these words said by Elisa when we visited the Bayernhof Museum (wch has a wonderful collection of automatic instruments audible in snippets here) wch appear in the soundtrack in systematic increasing density. This is augmented by Elisa practicing:
"Scherzo in Bb Major" by Franz Schubert
"Nocturne" by Frederic Chopin
"La fille aux chevaux de lin" by Claude Debussy
"Sonate Pathetique" by Ludwig van Beethoven
"Trois Gymnopedies" by Eric Satie
"Knight Rupert" by Robert Schumann
in that order. I can hardly emphasize enough the complexity of this edit.
04 Titin - pt 4 - 1:43:29 - sky-diving July 18, 2013; "Titin" composed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE July, 2013 & performed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (88 key version: acoustic piano) & Elisa (61 key version: electronics - as set up by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE) July, 2013
In the middle of the very early morning of the day when we were scheduled to go sky-diving Elisa went for a long walk that took her to a place w/ nice reverb acoustics. I met her there & shot some footage of her & my whistling. I then manipulated this to produce a loop of primitive quasi-Shepard-tones to create an illusion of continual falling in honor of this being the landing section.
Need I say? I haven't explained 'everything' about this, verbose as this description may seem. Anyway, I'd like to screen the movie somewhere, preferably as an installation. With this in mind, I've made an abridged version of it for Vimeo that's only 2:06 long for promotional purposes. It can be witnessed here:
https://vimeo.com/86542569
